Petition to the authors of Phylip
The participants of the Debian Med sprint in Southport (27.01. to 29.01.2012) would like to ask the authors of Phylip to reconsider their licensing conditions. The signers of this petition have a strong interest in including Phylip into the Debian distribution, along with otherwise free tools that inherit portions of the Phylip code (for instance recent version of SeaView). However, this conflicts with the following phrases of the Phylip license:
- .. the programs are not integrated with or called by any product or service that generates revenue,
- ..
- .. Permission requests for any other distribution of this program should be directed to license @ u.washington.edu
- ..
These phrases are in conflict with items 6., 7. and 9. of the Debian Free Software Guidelines which are widely accepted as Open Source definition because redistribution is restricted to specific cases.
To enable the full integration of Phylip into Debian, as well as Debian derived distributions like Ubuntu and Bio-Linux, we ask the copyright holders to consider a wording that would enable free redistribution. Alternatively you might want to release Phylip under well known free licenses like for instance GPL, Apache, MPL or BSD.
Signing Participants
Name |
Organisation |
|
Andreas Tille |
Debian |
|
Timothy Booth |
UK Natural Environment Research Council, Bio-Linux |